Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why

[Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>]

On Tuesday 31 August 2004 21.38, Spam wrote:
> > Salut,
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 08:17:36PM +0200, Spam wrote:
> >>   How  are  things  done on Windows platforms when there are files and
> >>   directories  with the same name? In Unix that is imposible. How does
> >>   it  work  for  environments  like  Cygwin  etc? What happen to tools
> >>   that run in them?
> >
> > In  NTFS it's  illegal  IIRC.  At least  the  fs correction  utilities
> > complain about a block being assigned to two files.
>
>   I  meant  a  file  and a directory with the same name, not two files
>   with the same name :) subtle but important difference.
>
>   ie,  you can have a file named "foo" and a directory named "foo" and
>   they won't collide.

You can't have a file and a directory with the same name in W*.

Alternative data streams don't appear in a normal directory. You
need special API:s and tools to see them. If you know the name of and ADS
you can however access them with standard tools, including cygwin.

echo foo >a.txt
echo bar >a.txt:b.txt

You can also have ADS's on directories. Not sure how Reiserfs4 does that.

mkdir foo
echo bar >foo:a.txt

-- robin